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A defining scene in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s startling movie Evil Does Not Exist shows an adversarial meeting between the residents of an idyllic Japanese village and the representatives of an opportunistic Tokyo-based company. The two groups have gathered to discuss plans for the construction of a luxury camping site. To build goodwill for the project, the representatives, a pair of meek city dwellers, deploy banal commercialese to make their case. They use phrases like “optimize” and “invigorate” to describe what the site might bring to the area. They insist it will be “mutually beneficial.”

But these benefits, if they are even to be taken seriously, are one-sided. Life in this pastoral community depends on finely tuned interactions between humans and the environment. Throughout Evil Does Not Exist, Hamaguchi offers elegant glimpses of daily routines as evidence of this carefully navigated relationship. We see Takumi, a central character played with haunting ambiguity by Hitoshi Omika,...

Hamaguchi's contemplative direction in Evil Does Not Exist is complemented by Ishibashi's eerie score. The film's divisive ending prompts deeper questions about the presence of violence in nature and society. Takumi's peaceful life becomes disrupted by a corporate invasion, highlighting the imbalance between industrial development and nature.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist is many things a fable about man's relationship with nature, a drama about a small village's fight against corporate pollution, a poem about the beauty and destruction brought on by the natural world. Ultimately, though, it eludes classification, refusing to commit to being one thing and instead asking us to question our relationship with the world around us.

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Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, is about to be disrupted by the...

“I’m back,” Hamaguchi Ryûsuke exuberantly proclaimed—in English no less—when introducing his latest film, Evil Does Not Exist, to a rapturous response from a New York Film Festival crowd in 2023. His punchy opening line was more overtly declarative than the work he was there to present. After his two-release breakout year in 2021 culminated in an Oscar victory for Drive My Car, Hamaguchi might have taken the familiar path of following up such a win with a big directorial proclamation. Instead, his latest feature belies the nature of its title and proves to be more of a question than a statement.

Some of this may be due to the genesis of Evil Does Not Exist, which doesn’t lie entirely with Hamaguchi himself. Ishibashi Eiko, his composer on Drive My Car, approached the director to create footage to accompany her live performances. Inspiration struck, and Hamaguchi’s remit expanded...

After years of making films in his native Japan, writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi found unexpected global success in 2021 with “Drive My Car.”

Adapted and expanded from short stories by Haruki Murakami, it’s an exquisite drama about a grieving theater director staging a multilingual “Uncle Vanya,” and his relationship with the pensive young woman employed to drive his cherry-red Saab.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe won the Best Screenplay prize, “Drive My Car” went on to dominate the fall festival circuit. The film clocked up an astonishing four nominations at the 2022 Oscars, including Best Picture and a Best Director nod for Hamaguchi, and went on to win Japan’s first Oscar for Best International Film.

Hamaguchi’s latest film, “Evil Does Not Exist” is to some extent a response to that overwhelming acclaim. “I knew that I wanted my next work to be very...

Clockwise from bottom left: Good One (Metrograph Pictures), Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney/Marvel), The Watchers (Warner Bros.), Alien: Romulus (20th Century Studios)Graphic: The A.V. Club

Yesterday, we took a look at the films that really stand out to us this summer, but there are still plenty of other movies on...

Evil Does Not ExistPhoto: Janus Films

There are few things more bone-chilling than the real-life evils set upon our planet and its people each and every day. This is the type of horror Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is contending with in Evil Does Not Exist, the stirring and eerie follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2021 film,...